FBI files
detailing Israel’s stealth acquisition of U.S. nuclear triggers were
declassified and released on Dec. 28, 2011. The FBI’s secret
Portland and Los Angeles inter-office communications were originally
scheduled for release in the year 2036. Their availability today
reveals how Israel’s elite spy networks acquire U.S. nuclear
technologies while evading criminal and diplomatic consequences.

A krytron is a gas-filled tube used as a high-speed switch. U.S.
State Department munitions licenses are needed to export krytrons
because they can be used as triggers for nuclear weapons.
California-based MILCO International Inc. shipped 15 orders totaling
800 krytrons through an intermediary to the Israeli Ministry of
Defense between 1979 and 1983. MILCO obtained the krytrons from EG&G
Inc. After the U.S. government rejected several requests for krytron export
licenses to Israel, Arnon Milchan’s Heli Trading Company brokered
the transactions with MILCO. Milchan is an Israeli movie producer
who became successful in Hollywood for such movies as Brazil, JFK,
and Pretty Woman.

The FBI file reveals that after the illicit krytron exports were
discovered, a U.S. attorney tried to flip MILCO President Richard
Kelly Smyth to implicate Milchan during intense plea bargaining. The
gambit failed, and in May 1984 Smyth was indicted on 30 counts of
smuggling and making false statements. Smyth and his wife
promptly fled to Israel and remained at large until captured
in Malaga, Spain, in July 2001 after Richard Smyth applied for
Social Security benefits. INTERPOL arrested Smyth and
extradited him to the United States, where he pleaded guilty to violating the U.S.
Arms Export Control Act. In November 2001, Smyth was
sentenced to 40 years in prison and fined $20,000, though he was
freed within four years because of his advancing age.

In 1985, a federal grand jury was convened in Los Angeles to
investigate potentially related Atomic Energy Act and Arms Export
Control Act violations, but no charges were ever filed against
Milchan or those who secretly helped Smyth flee and who covered
his living expenses abroad. A 2011 biography called Confidential:
The Life of Secret Agent Turned Hollywood Tycoon Arnon Milchanclaims
that Milchan was recruited into Israel’s LAKAM economic
espionage unit in his 20s and became a key operative for Benjamin
Blumberg (head of LAKAM) and Rafi Eitan (who ran Jonathan Pollard
and infiltrated NUMEC).
Milchan is also the close confidant of Shimon Peres and Benjamin
Netanyahu. According to the book, Blumberg himself taught Milchan
how to establish front companies and secret bank accounts to
launder millions in commissions obtained during LAKAM and Mossad
arms transactions. In turn, it was Milchan who encouraged
Smyth in 1972 to incorporate MILCO and share profits on export sales
to his Tel Aviv–based Milchan Brothers company. Milchan
Brothers received purchase orders from Blumberg and sent them on via
secure telex to Smyth. MILCO did 80% of its business
with Milchan, including shipments of other dual-use technologies
useful to Israel’s clandestine nuclear weapons program such as gyroscopes, neutron generators, high-speed oscilloscopes,
and computerized flight control systems. According to the book,
after Smyth was ordered to appear before a federal prosecutor in Los
Angeles, LAKAM issued a burn
notice. Milchan claimed, “I felt bad, but I was ordered to
cut all contact with Smyth.” Milchan still officially denies
any involvement in MILCO/Heli’s krytron smuggling

The FBI records reveal ongoing interest in Milchan into the
mid-1990s. In 1992, a confidential informant relayed details of
Milchan’s ties to Smyth. The declassified but heavily redacted
“secret” communications reveal the Bureau’s fascination
with Milchan, from his 1996 entry in Who’s Who
to A-list associates such as Robert De Niro and an unsavory Iran-Contra operative.

Like the NUMEC case, the krytron caper benefited from flawed
elite news coverage that today seems superficial if not suspicious.
Among the final pages of the FBI’s file is a clipping of Thomas
Friedman’s May 1985 New York Times interview with Milchan,
who had suddenly decamped for Jerusalem after the Smyth
indictments. Milchan said he had only recently
learned “that a krytron was a small little gizmo which anyone
can go buy freely in the United States. You can use them or
all kinds of things, including, incidentally, making cholent.”
Friedman clarified for readers that “Cholent is a stew of
beans, carrots, potatoes and beef that is a traditional Jewish dish
prepared on Friday night for eating on the Sabbath. Mr.
Milchan said that with a krytron timer a stove could be set to turn
on automatically to heat up cholent on the Sabbath without anyone
working to light the fire.”

The FBI’s news clipping file contains far less credulous accounts of
frantic State Department attempts to secure the return of the
krytrons or at least verify that they were not being deployed into
Israel’s secret nuclear arsenal. Unlike most U.S. government
agencies, the FBI didn’t muzzle itself under “strategic
ambiguity” protocols but instead spoke candidly of Israel’s
nukes. “At the time of [Smyth’s] disappearance, the U.S. did
not have any reliable information that the Israelis were enriching
uranium via uranium hexafluoride. That information did not
surface for another year until an individual named [Mordecai Vanunu]
detailed drawings and photographs of Dimona, Israel’s nuclear
research center, to the London Times.”

The declassified details of Smyth’s and Milchan’s flight,
elite influence networks, and near complete lack of accountability
over the krytron case fits neatly into a larger emerging set of
attributes common to many major Israeli espionage efforts in the United States.
As happened during NUMEC’s diversion of weapons-grade nuclear
material to Israel, apparently more time was spent
exploring Milchan’s elite connections than figuring out how to
indict LAKAM’s nuclear technology operative. As in the case of the
Lawrence
Franklin AIPAC espionage affair, the mysterious figures who
offered to spirit the main operative out of the United States to overseas safe
houses were never apprehended or even publicly identified.

In America today, open financial support for Israel’s clandestine
nuclear program is becoming more brazen even as many of its
supporters and lobbyists demand U.S. military attacks on
Iran’s nuclear program. The American Committee for the Weizmann
Institute raises millions in tax-deductible funding for its
Israeli parent organization, which was found in a 1987
Pentagon-sponsored study to have developed a cutting-edge high-energy physics and hydrodynamics program “needed
for nuclear bomb design.” The Weizmann Institute advanced
methods for enriching uranium to weapons-grade through the use of
lasers even as the United States worried that Weizmann’s networked
supercomputers were being used to reduce the size of warheads. Despite
public calls for an IRS
review of its tax-exempt status, the American Committee plows on
announcing new
corporate grants, ever confident that its elite overlapping
board, which has included such luminaries as AIPAC/WINEP chairman
emeritus Robert Asher, will back
Weizmann, ensuring that nuclear funding continues to flow.

Perhaps trying not to be outdone, President Barack Obama announced at
AIPAC’s Washington conference that he will soon take center stage in the
Israeli nuclear Théâtre
de l’Absurde. According to author Avner
Cohen, Israeli President Shimon Peres was a key architect of
Israel’s nuclear weapons program from its very beginning. In 2010,
scholar Sasha
Polakow-Suransky released secret documents revealing how Peres
even offered
to sell nuclear-tipped Jericho missiles to the foundering
apartheid regime in South Africa. That is why this summer, when
Obama personally awards Peres a Presidential Medal of Freedom, he’ll
be conferring America’s highest civilian award to the Middle East’s
most
notorious nuclear proliferator.

Israel is a self serving entity only, and cares nothing about the US, or any other country. This being the case, one must hope that a scandal erupts involving AIPAC, and Israel. Once the US cuts ties to this pariah state the better off all Americans will be.

I'm curious how the US intelligence personnel feel when they read such things. I know the top level is fully comprised by Israel and for the most part consists of incompetent morons and Israel-firsters …. but what about the "boot on the ground" type agent. The mid-level guy who is, presumably, concerned with our nation and our future. I wonder how they justify this foreign nation of Israel shitting on us any time they feel like it with complete impunity. Part of me wants to think that it bothers them … another part of me really wonders though with the complete lack of action to protect our sovereignty from Israel.

[…] AntiWar – FBI files detailing Israel’s stealth acquisition of U.S. nuclear triggers were declassified and released on Dec. 28, 2011. The FBI’s secret Portland and Los Angeles inter-office communications were originally scheduled for release in the year 2036. Their availability today reveals how Israel’s elite spy networks acquire U.S. nuclear technologies while evading criminal and diplomatic consequences. […]

[…] FBI files detailing Israel’s stealth acquisition of U.S. nuclear triggers were declassified and released on Dec. 28, 2011. The FBI’s secret Portland and Los Angeles inter-office communications were originally scheduled for release in the year 2036. Their availability today reveals how Israel’s elite spy networks acquire U.S. nuclear technologies while evading criminal and diplomatic consequences. […]

[…] out of California to Israel. When such crimes occurred in the past — such as in the case of MILCO smuggling nuclear triggers out of California to Israel — the US at least criminally investigated Israel’s US operatives […]

[…] out of California to Israel. When such crimes occurred in the past — such as in the case of MILCO smuggling nuclear triggers out of California to Israel — the US at least criminally investigated Israel’s US operatives […]

[…] out of California to Israel. When such crimes occurred in the past — such as in the case of MILCO smuggling nuclear triggers out of California to Israel — the US at least criminally investigated Israel’s US operatives […]

[…] out of California to Israel. When such crimes occurred in the past — such as in the case of MILCO smuggling nuclear triggers out of California to Israel — the US at least criminally investigated Israel’s US operatives […]

[…] out of California to Israel. When such crimes occurred in the past — such as in the case of MILCO smuggling nuclear triggers out of California to Israel — the US at least criminally investigated Israel’s US operatives […]

[…] out of California to Israel. When such crimes occurred in the past — such as in the case of MILCO smuggling nuclear triggers out of California to Israel — the US at least criminally investigated Israel’s US operatives […]

[…] has ever fielded,” who according to recently declassified FBI files played a key role in the stealth acquisition of U.S. nuclear triggers by the Middle East’s sole albeit “unmentionable” nuclear […]

[…] has ever fielded,” who according to recently declassified FBI files played a key role in the stealth acquisition of U.S. nuclear triggers by the Middle East’s sole albeit “unmentionable” nuclear […]

[…] From DiCaprio to Eastwood, Netanyahu's star-studded LA dinner – Israel Culture, Ynetnews Israel’s Nuclear Triggers by Grant Smith — Antiwar.com And look how even poor old Chris Christie had to apologise to Adelson for talking about the […]